Import/export 3ds format in Blender 2.8
As @robert-gützkow mentioned, the 3DS addon is still being worked on. It appears to work fine with Blender all the way up to version 2.92. It just hasn't been merged into the main build due to some technicalities that haven't been resolved.
The easiest place to get the current version of the addon is from the Github mirror.
Download all of the scripts (Code-&gt;Download .zip) and then pick a method to install the io_scene_3ds addon. Personally, I zipped up the io_scene_3ds directory and used the 'Install...' option to install io_scene_3ds.zip. You could alternatively dump the whole  blender-addons-contrib repository into your blender user scripts directory as discussed here: Installing an addon
Once the addon is installed the import/export menus will have a .3ds option.